A HARROWING TALE
Real-life teenage librarian of Auschwitz tells her story in new memoir
A Delayed Life Dita Kraus Penguin
Dita Kraus never goes to bed without poring over the latest book at her bedside. It is a habit that has endured until now, her 91st year. No matter where she is, she is always reading. Books became her escape from reality, she remembers, in the years she spent as the unofficial teenage librarian of Auschwitz.
That role was lightly fictionalized in Antonio Iturbe’s novel The Librarian of Auschwitz that became a bestseller last year. Now, the real Dita has written her own memoir, recounting her time presiding over the smallest library in the world.
What happened to Dita “was never meant to be a book,” she says from her home in Netanya, Israel, where she has lived for more than 60 years. “I wrote my childhood memories and the present ones, for my children to read.” It was only when her writer husband, Otto, died that his publisher asked, “What do you write?” Suddenly those recollections, intended simply as a footnote for her family, would make Dita a memoirist of one of history’s darkest episodes.
Of the 12 or so books rescued from prisoners’ luggage at a family camp set up at Auschwitz for Jews from the ghetto of Theresienstadt in German-occupied Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), she can remember just one: A Short History of the World by H.G. Wells, lauded for showing the progress civilization had made.
Freddy Hirsch, their block’s unofficial leader, set up the little makeshift library that would be Dita’s only diversion from the bonedeep starvation so overwhelming “you can’t think of anything (except) food and dreams of what was and what maybe will be again.” There were no membership cards or loan dates, but the handful of books that had escaped incineration — one of which was a Russian grammar book — provided purpose, and a way for Hirsch’s appointed educators to teach little ones the alphabet.
The real magic of stories came from the camp’s “living books” — Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, The Count of Monte Cristo — passages of which would be relayed from memory to the children spending their days in unimaginable horror.
Dita was 14 on the night in December 1943, when she and her parents arrived on a boxcar crammed with 2,500 people to blinding lights and “SS men with barking German shepherd dogs, shouts, screams, pandemonium.” And then they heard the word “Auschwitz.” “‘This is where we are now,’ I realized,” Dita recalls, “in the notorious concentration camp.”
So began a life in which days and months melded into nothing. They spent hours each day lining up in their rags to be counted in the freezing cold, eating turnip or potato soup for lunch, then back to the block to lie on their bunks in the dark. A few weeks after their arrival, Dita’s father, Hans, wasted away in his bed, emaciated, aged 44. His daughter had expected to meet her own end within six months, an assignation of 6SB (“a euphemism for death by gas”) having been marked by her name when she entered the camp. An inconceivable thought for any child, yet somehow more so for Dita who, from a secular Czech family, had only found out she was Jewish at age eight.
A fact of birth that she had considered inconsequential would see her late childhood being spent in environments evermore closely approximating hell: the ghetto, then Auschwitz, then to work in Hamburg after being sent there by SS physician Dr. Josef Mengele, followed by Bergen-Belsen camp — “the most horrible place on Earth” — which she and her mother reached in 1945. “The ground was covered with dead people,” yet Dita felt “no sorrow, no pity.
I felt nothing at all ... I existed on the biological level only, devoid of any humanity.”
When a voice came over the loudspeaker in April 1945 telling prisoners, “We are the British army and we have come to liberate you,” she did not rejoice. By that stage, “the expectation of anything good had long ago been suppressed.”
Eventually, 16-year-old Dita was free, put on a coach back home. But the Germans had long since looted the rented flat she and her parents had lived in. “I had nowhere to go back to. I had nothing,” she says. Dita recalled a distant aunt — non-Jewish — in Prague who “helped me adjust again to life,” securing her documents and buying clothes from charity shops.
Suffering did not end at liberation. Two months after they were freed, her mother became ill and, the next day, was dead. Dita did not cry, her body having reached a stage, after such inexhaustible sadness, where “nature just freezes your emotions.” She adds: “It took a long time until I was able to cry again, and to feel sadness and joy.”
She says she is unsure she has ever felt as she did before the war began. As well as the number tattooed on her forearm, 73,305 — which she sometimes wakes shouting, as she was forced to in the camps — Dita’s mother still comes to her in her dreams. From latent guilt, she wonders, that Dita was not at her bedside when she perished.
Her mother’s death is one of “additional holocausts in my private life” that Dita has endured in the 75 years since the war. Her daughter, Michaela, died at 20, having spent more than a decade sick with a fatal liver condition. Her eldest, Shimon, died at 60 having suffered from mental, and then physical, decline. Dita had become a mother at 18. “Mentally, I was not ready — I was too childish myself,” she says. But Otto, eight years her senior and whom she had met in Terezin and reunited with in Czechoslovakia, had been “crushed by having no family” and wanted to build their own.
She was “very happy” when Shimon was born, calculating that he would turn 18 when she was 36 — “we will dance together!” she hoped. Yet his decline would be her “third holocaust,” Dita says today. “There were almost no long periods of happiness and quiet and peace of mind. I almost had no good years.”
Her youngest, Ronny, and his family remain a source of mirth: “We are close,” she says, though they diverge on politics, a subject Dita “hates.” She also has little truck with religion, finding it “unnecessary.”
What she does believe in is telling the story of the Holocaust, which she has done in schools in the U.S., Israel and Britain, and ensuring that the “very worrisome” rise of anti-Semitism cannot lay the vicious roots it once did.
Since the release of Iturbe’s book, readers from New Zealand to Romania have contacted her — an audience that will likely grow with the publication of A Delayed Life.
What do people tell her when they get in touch? “They always praise my courage and they think I am an unusual heroine.” That last word rankles, she says, “because I don’t think I am.”
Why? “There were lots of people like me. I was not alone.”
That may be so. But for those hearing Dita’s story of survival for the first time, it seems a modest assessment.